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Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

237 points by jonbaer 6y ago

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
This appears to be a surprisingly level-headed government initiative. The amount is enough to do something but not so much as to be a colossal boondoggle. It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications. > bipartisan Also by coincidence (?) the first time I've seen that word used recently in a context that wasn't preceded by the words lack of or similar.
- adventured 6y ago
  I agree. It'd be concerning if they launched with some obscene $1 billion type financial tag with it. If or when it makes sense, they can always increase funding for these three centers and or to build additional centers. Which is exactly what I'd expect in the coming years.
  - elliotec 6y ago
    I dunno. This seems worthy of a lot more funding than a dog walking app that raised $361 million https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wag https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wag
    - rlt 6y ago
      Fortunately I don’t think the US government invested in Wag. Not surprisingly, the bulk of that was from SoftBank’s Vision Fund: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/SoftBank2/SoftBank-suffers-another-writedown-after-Wag-stake-sale https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/SoftBank2/SoftBank-suffers-...
    - adventured 6y ago
      Why is it worthy of a lot more than $361 million in initial funding? Your premise is that it'll stop at $75 million in funding. I'd bet against that premise. The US Government has a tendency to start its programs small and expand them considerably over time. Besides, the US simultaneously has several of the world's largest companies pouring resources into quantum computing (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Honeywell, Lockheed, Intel, et al.). It's not as though $75 million is the extent of US investment into the space.
    - DevKoala 6y ago
      That's a SoftBank valuation. Those were inflated.
  - godelski 6y ago
    I disagree. I'd be completely find with a $1bn financial tag with it. That's not going to be $1bn for a year but spread over something like 5-10 years. If this is a strategic technology, it is highly beneficial for the government to invest in it. They'll make the money back once the technology becomes widespread. And I mean, look at the last paragraph > ... the NSF that would be given $100 billion over five years to invest in American research and technology issues, including quantum computing. Which seems low when you consider that we spent $430 bn on the F35 and lifetime expected cost is 1.5tn for more acquisition and maintenance. Governments work with larger amounts of money and when you look at science (arguably the best way to get ahead in military) it is pennies (CERN was funded internationally and only cost around $20bn over 10 years and $1bn/yr for operation). I mean the largest super computers cost only a couple hundred million, which means if Google or Facebook wanted to, they could compete.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  >It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications. Quantum computing ? I've seen just a few months ago some article about a single start-up raising >200M ?
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    There is a difference between doing fundamental research and bringing a product to market. We know enough about quantum computers to be able to build some of them in limited ways which are commercially useful in very specific domains, so then companies can get investment to do that. But we still don't really understand all of the fundamentals, and it's always hard to raise investment for fundamental research. Suppose you could prove that building a quantum computer that can run Shor's Algorithm on interestingly large numbers is impossible. Knowing that would be of immense value. People could stop wasting time trying to create it or defend against it. But how would anybody commercialize that information? Who has the incentive to fund that research?
    - hannob 6y ago
      > We know enough about quantum computers to be able to build some of them in limited ways which are commercially useful in very specific domains In which way are quantum computers commercially useful?
      - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
        > In which way are quantum computers commercially useful? VC Bait seems like a natural fit. Just say you are making a quantum computer that predicts global warming trends using blockchain. Might want to buy a wheel barrel for all your money you’ll be leaving that meeting with.
        mr__y 6y ago
        You forgot about supporting 5G
- kitteh 6y ago
  Advisors make these recommendations. Say the right words about the US falling behind China or national security risk and no one wants to be the person on record who said no to this.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >Say the right words about the US falling behind China or national security risk and no one wants to be the person on record who said no to this. Or just say Obama wouldn't have the guts to do it[0]. [0]https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-launched-yemen-raid-told-obama-wouldn-article-1.2966736 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-launched-yem...
    - jonny_eh 6y ago
      Those only helps get one side on board.
- trekrich 6y ago
  so close to admitting trump has done something decent!
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    Is this coming from him directly? I would be really surprised, he has plenty of advisors for that. What comes out of him directly is more visible on ie twitter, different story
    - trekrich 6y ago
      You dont really know what directlys come from him though. His twitter account and all the stuff he says is just a smoke screen to keep everyone outraged. Who knows what he is really doing in the background.
      - whoiskevin 6y ago
        Oh please. As many have said stop pretending that he is playing chess when he is sitting there eating the pieces like a toddler.
      - dimillian 6y ago
        lol.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      Better or worse, little of what the executive does is really because of the president directly. The president chooses the sort of people to put in positions of power then the whole ship largely sorts itself out. But the president gets to be responsible for everything because they are nominally in charge, and people keep pretending they are superheros with all sorts of ability to personally oversee how the US operates. We can certainly say that if Trump didn't want quantum computing research to happen his administration wouldn't be doing it. So if it does, he has de facto supported it. Even if by inaction.
    - inscionent 6y ago
      This is implementation of a law passed by congress in 2018.
- loudtieblahblah 6y ago
  >preceded by the words lack of or similar. Eh, bipartisan stuff still happens. Look at the military industrial complex. Expanding executive power, expanding the surveillance state. Pro wall street regulation repeal. Usually its to screw us
  - hajile 6y ago
    While the media paints a different picture, bills sanctioning and restricting China have also been getting through which also means bi-partisan support despite the election rhetoric.
  - YinglingLight 6y ago
    One does not simply get into $26T in debt without a whole lot of agreement from both sides of the aisle. To view any side as pure is to be a pawn in the overton window.
    - fearingreprisal 6y ago
      Why was this comment killed? It was just about the only sane comment in this thread.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        I'm not sure what the mechanism is (i.e. karma threshold or moderation) but it looks like all the account's comments are dead by default and have been for a very long time.
  - rescripting 6y ago
    Viewed through that lens perhaps this initiative is to help push quantum computing to a place where it can break modern encryption.
    - ta17711771 6y ago
      Cynical me figured there wasn't much other purpose for those approving funding.
- ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
  Wonder if Peter Thiel had a hand in it.
SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
Surely this amount pales in comparison to the likely level of investment in this field by the intelligence community, considering the implications for cryptography. This is like announcing $75m for nuclear technology research during the Manhattan Project.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  This is about setting curriculums at universities and student grants.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
    Yes, and who do you think is most likely to hire those students after they’ve gained expertise in the field?
    - wadkar 6y ago
      Whoever is paying the most, probably?
- ahelwer 6y ago
  NIST is already well into a post-quantum crypto competition. Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA. Cloudflare has already prototyped protocols in TLS [0]. Scott Aaronson has gone on record saying he would be "astonished" if this happened within a decade. This isn't like the cold war days. The quantum computing research community is close-knit and people would notice researchers being hoovered up by the NSA; this hasn't happened. Shor's algorithm is undeniably a groundbreaking result but is not the killer app of quantum computers. It's more of an unfortunate side-effect. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/
  - amelius 6y ago
    > Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA Yes, but the NSA could still decrypt messages from the past if they recorded and stored them.
mhxion 6y ago
This initiative is launched quicker than I expected, considering the pressure on federal budget due to the pandemic. It's part of National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December, 2018. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227
- zenhack 6y ago
  $75M is rounding error compared to anything being discussed in the vicinity of the pandemic; I wouldn't really expect it to enter into the conversation.
  - throwaway72220 6y ago
    It is a start, right?
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    Every line item in the budget is a rounding error until you add them all up.
    - zenhack 6y ago
      The package they passed in March was $2 trillion. That's _five orders of magnitude_ difference.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
I can build one for $20
trissylegs 6y ago
I think Australia has invested at least that over the past 12 years. Last year UNSW's Quantum Computer lab got a $25 million grant extension.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- koheripbal 6y ago
  This isn't the US's only quantum computing project or gov't funding.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fk6aaa545c 6y ago
"Defund the computing centers" when?
- doersino 6y ago
  The last time I checked, computing centers haven't been murdering people.
  - fk6aaa545c 6y ago
    So check again. You can start by IBM back in the 40s ... and today have a look at NSA and CCP as well." Would be a nice "research" actaully.
biolurker1 6y ago
Why does the title have to be political ans not "The US gov..."? Sounds like there is an agenda
- pbourke 6y ago
  > "The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced Tuesday the establishment of three quantum computing centers across the nation, involving an investment of $75 million." It was a White House initiative, so the headline seems to be accurate.
- jcfields 6y ago
  If the administration deserves the blame when it does something bad, it deserves the credit when it does something good.
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    "does" is doing a lot of work there.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  The Hill is focused primarily on Washington politics so 75% of the stories are about the Administration/House/Senate/Supreme Court/Agency putting out a press release or taking some procedural step.
- insensible 6y ago
  Turn on any NPR News broadcast over at least the past two decades and the first story will invariably start "The ______ administration…", regardless of who's in office.
- krapp 6y ago
  It's common to refer to an administration by the name of the current President than "the US government," particularly within the US where the Hill is based. You can find numerous references for example to the "Obama Administration, Clinton Adminstration, Bush Administration, etc" in the media. There's no "agenda" at work here, you're just being needlessly paranoid.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
Someone needs to invest in developing improved mental models for quantum computers. Much of the development of classical computing (particular from a user perspective) was driven by metaphors: memory, stacks, pipes, files, folders, etc. What are useful metaphors in the application or use of quantum computers?
- ahelwer 6y ago
  Quantum computers are modeled with extremely basic linear algebra. Quantum states are vectors and gates are matrices which multiply those vectors to get new vectors. How much simpler do you want? You can explain most of it as rotations around the unit circle which we all learn in high school or earlier. The problem is pop science crap that tries to explain superposition and entanglement with complete word salad instead of "linear combination" and "product vector cannot be factored into tensor product of single-qbit states", respectively. Anyway it is extremely doubtful that more programmers will need to learn how to program a quantum computer than, say, will need to learn how to program a GPU. They're both useful co-processors for very specific workloads. Programming will remain a fundamentally classical endeavor.
  - weakfish 6y ago
    Do you know how pretentious this sounds? Not everyone outside the HN tech bubble has any idea what those words mean.
    - derrick_jensen 6y ago
      Most advantages that quantum computing has aren't practical for most people outside "the HN tech bubble". It's meant for specialized types of high throughput computations.
    - ahelwer 6y ago
      Popular science has been trying to explain quantum mechanics to people for well over half a century now, and it hasn't worked one time. All we got was a bunch of woo like What the Bleep do We Know?! You need math. There's no other way around it. Any understanding of quantum mechanics or computing that is not fundamentally rooted in mathematical reasoning is worse than mush.
russellbeattie 6y ago
This administration is anti-science in every way possible way - from the climate to covid to education and more. $75M is literally a rounding error when it comes to the federal budget. This is pure election year nonsense - basically it's a $75 million marketing ploy (using tax dollars) to beef up the administration's pitiful record on science. I am looking forward to the outrageous lies about this soon. Trump will have "saved the tech industry" or "invented quantum computing" and we'll hear stories about how amazed all the researchers are at how well he understands it since she's such a genius. I'll put money on it.
- monoclechris 6y ago
  Where?
- sgt 6y ago
  Well it sure fooled me. I was just about to vote for Trump based on this!
- rvz 6y ago
  Fantastic. We'll also be looking forward to hearing from you comparing him to fascist dictators and outright Nazis everywhere because orange man == bad. The situations you bring up is everyone's fault for not taking the pandemic seriously from the start. > This is pure election year nonsense Nonsense happens every election year. Just like the BLM chaos in 2016 and the Twitter archeologists finding dirt on everyone. History is repeating itself every election year.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    >The situations you bring up is everyone's fault for not taking the pandemic seriously from the start. // So Trump isn't a leader and should have been ignored from the get-go? Or, he is a leader and his actions are criminally incompetent? [or purposefully malicious??] Do you really believe it should be everyone for themselves rather than having a centrally funded means of establishing scientific consensus and propagating life-saving advice?
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
helsinki 6y ago
This is sublime. If you’re reading this, Trump, please do more of this.
bezmenov 6y ago
For those curious about Quantum computing, an excellent starting point: https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc
JimRyan 6y ago
"We're making supercomputers, the best computers!" In all seriousness this is great news.
amINeolib 6y ago
Republicans And Democrats agree to spend more tax dollars. I'm shocked. What great initiative for our politicians to spend our money. /s Given we have private companies and universities working on this, seems like another way of growing government and giving money to politicians friends. Although since USD is a world currency, I suppose we can just print money and devalue which disproportionately affects foreigners.
snidane 6y ago
Hmm, I thought quantum computing is not happening. See https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-computing-as-a-field-is-obvious-bullshit/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-comput... Can somebody dispute this claim?
- _8091149529 6y ago
  It's tempting to dismiss that write-up due to its incendiary style, but I find that many of its "factory floor" level insights ring true to me. As an experimentalist, I would agree with the sentiment that the potential future applications of Quantum computing probably receive too much media attention, given the maturity level of existing technology. The technical arguments as to why building a useful QC will be impossible are a bit more shaky. First, the post seems to imply that the calibration effort scales with the number of gates in the algorithm. This is false. In reality, the number of interactions that need individual calibration is basically the number of qubit-qubit pairs exposed by the gate library. The most mainstream approach to error-corrected QC only uses nearest-neighbor interactions, and hence the scaling is linear. Second, it is not clear to me why the number of computational basis states (2^N) is relevant to the engineering at all. Following this line of thinking, the recent Quantum supremacy result by Google already amounted to a mastery of 2^53 ~ 10^16 degrees of freedom. Third, an argument is made that large-scale error correction will not work because of correlated errors, of unspecified nature. I think a claim like this should come with a mention of at least one concrete source of such errors, so that we could estimate its magnitude and potential severity. Note that such calculations are almost the essence of day-to-day work of a physicist. In the absence of more detail, I can make a generic counterargument: Any phenomenon causing such correlated errors by definition affects multiple physical qubits at once, and will tend to be more macroscopic in nature. This is in contrast with the processes that limit the fidelity of one- and two-qubit operations, which is what the error-correcting code will take care of. Macroscopic disturbances are exactly the ones that we can attempt to shield against with clever engineering.
  - dandanua 6y ago
    John Martinis emphasized in his talks that they didn't observe any correlations between local errors in the Sycamore and the total error can be computed through the "high school probability theory" from the local errors. This pretty much silences deniers who used this totally made-up argument against quantum computing.
upofadown 6y ago
>...along with helping to develop curriculum for students in the quantum computing field to help expand the workforce in this area. How do you develop a curriculum for something that has not been invented yet and might not even be possible to expand to a useful level? How can you have a workforce? Sounds like someone was just cutting and pasting from a general policy...
- non-entity 6y ago
  Doesnt "the workforce" in quantum computing consist of physics PhDs anyways.
oldsklgdfth 6y ago
I can't tell if this number is large or small. However, all research institutions take a cut of grant money in what is usually called "Facilities and Administration" cost. My undergrad rate was 50% of the proposed sum. Obviously the exact rate varies, but the fee remains. Ex. If a professor is writes a proposal for 1M. When the funding agency awards it they tack on another 1M for the institution. This is why "expensive" research is favored in universities, over theoretical work. A big part of tenure review is how much money you have brought in in funding, because that's a direct measure of how much money you made the institution. So 75M is more like 30M-40M of directly funded research, with the rest going to the institutions. EDIT: Berkeley's F&A goes at high as 60%. https://spo.berkeley.edu/policy/fa.html#rates https://spo.berkeley.edu/policy/fa.html#rates
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  The professor's monthly stipend from the CCP surely eases the financial stress.
- zucker42 6y ago
  That seems like a perverse incentive.
  - oldsklgdfth 6y ago
    Agreed. This is what you get when you measure performance in terms of profits. To quote Major General Smedley Butler: "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." Higher education is a rachet. Students pay ever-higher tuition, which at some level is backstopped by the government. If you don't go to college and pursue prestigious degrees the job market will be inaccessible, beyond basic skill entry level. Graduate students are exploited laborers for the promise of a PhD and a letter of recommendation for a postdoc. Drawing from a global pool of talent for cheap research labor. If you don't do everything your advisor says you will lose your visa, or not get a publication and your academic career is dead-on-arrival. Professors are in an environment that encourages pursuing expensive application-based research and high impact publications to pad their resumes for tenure. If you don't rake in the money and publish in "prestigious" journal (usually the walled off ones) you will not be considered for tenure, a raise, etc. Tax dollars fund research institutions that take their generous "administration" fees and then hand over findings to walled garden journals. If you don't fund research we will not make the breakthroughs that gave us out "comfortable" way of life. In the US, student athletes (until recently) could not profit off their likeness and all the money went to the school. At the end of the day, the team of MBAs and administrators make fat salaries. This wouldn't be so bad if institutions used the revenue to improve education and dissemination of knowledge. Instead, they build fancy stadiums and raise tuition.
nomad543 6y ago
Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin Dismisses Quantum Computing> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQSbV_BlI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQSbV_BlI8
- dandanua 6y ago
  Haters gonna hate. John Martinis at Google did a very good job for silencing those deniers.
  - nomad543 6y ago
    So anyone who questions quantum computing is a hater? Your argument reminds me of one interview where Elizabeth Holmes said everyone was a hater for doubting her. John Martinis didn't silence anyone, after decades, still there's no verifiable proof of quantum computing.
IAmEveryone 6y ago
...and by not letting anyone not descending in a straight line from the Mayflower work at it, they make sure it's second-rate, at best. Of course if he also succeeds in abolishing universities' non-profit status as he's recently started adding to his culture war talking point reservoir, not even Americans will be there to run this thing.
biffstallion 6y ago
Came here looking for childish comments...leaving completely satisfied.
Apofis 6y ago
I'm really happy to hear this, but this problem is expensive and that better be a B next time.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
Since we're throwing trillions around these days (needed, absolutely,) I'd quietly sneak a few billion is vital things that are harder to fund in normal times. OK, here are $x Billion, make us #1 in this field.
_8091149529 6y ago
Title of the post is misleading: The newly-funded centers will address three different topics in the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS). Quantum computing (the integer-factoring kind) is the focus of only the UC Berkeley-led consortium. This effort accounts for 1/3 of the announced funding. The other two centers will work on Quantum networking (UIUC) and Quantum sensing (U Colorado). Original NSF announcement: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/072120.jsp https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/07212...
- non-entity 6y ago
  > Quantum networking Any recommended reading materials on this?
hello_1234 6y ago
Cue the closeted trump supporters finally coming out in hordes to pat themselves in the back. It's very likely the white house approved it not for science but more for "national security". Wouldn't it be great if someone can combine "climate science" together with "national security" to get some much needed funding for climate research.
Balgair 6y ago
The CU site is likely tied quantum gyros and axial sensors. Think super precise positional sensors. Quantum technology is more than just computers. Anyone know of any good quantum tech based companies in Boulder?
RocketSyntax 6y ago
Hmm. No MIT.

237 points by jonbaer 6y ago

This appears to be a surprisingly level-headed government initiative. The amount is enough to do something but not so much as to be a colossal boondoggle. It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications. > bipartisan Also by coincidence (?) the first time I've seen that word used recently in a context that wasn't preceded by the words lack of or similar.

adventured 6y ago
I agree. It'd be concerning if they launched with some obscene $1 billion type financial tag with it. If or when it makes sense, they can always increase funding for these three centers and or to build additional centers. Which is exactly what I'd expect in the coming years.
- elliotec 6y ago
  I dunno. This seems worthy of a lot more funding than a dog walking app that raised $361 million https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wag https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wag
  - rlt 6y ago
    Fortunately I don’t think the US government invested in Wag. Not surprisingly, the bulk of that was from SoftBank’s Vision Fund: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/SoftBank2/SoftBank-suffers-another-writedown-after-Wag-stake-sale https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/SoftBank2/SoftBank-suffers-...
  - adventured 6y ago
    Why is it worthy of a lot more than $361 million in initial funding? Your premise is that it'll stop at $75 million in funding. I'd bet against that premise. The US Government has a tendency to start its programs small and expand them considerably over time. Besides, the US simultaneously has several of the world's largest companies pouring resources into quantum computing (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Honeywell, Lockheed, Intel, et al.). It's not as though $75 million is the extent of US investment into the space.
  - DevKoala 6y ago
    That's a SoftBank valuation. Those were inflated.
- godelski 6y ago
  I disagree. I'd be completely find with a $1bn financial tag with it. That's not going to be $1bn for a year but spread over something like 5-10 years. If this is a strategic technology, it is highly beneficial for the government to invest in it. They'll make the money back once the technology becomes widespread. And I mean, look at the last paragraph > ... the NSF that would be given $100 billion over five years to invest in American research and technology issues, including quantum computing. Which seems low when you consider that we spent $430 bn on the F35 and lifetime expected cost is 1.5tn for more acquisition and maintenance. Governments work with larger amounts of money and when you look at science (arguably the best way to get ahead in military) it is pennies (CERN was funded internationally and only cost around $20bn over 10 years and $1bn/yr for operation). I mean the largest super computers cost only a couple hundred million, which means if Google or Facebook wanted to, they could compete.
rubber_duck 6y ago
>It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications. Quantum computing ? I've seen just a few months ago some article about a single start-up raising >200M ?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  There is a difference between doing fundamental research and bringing a product to market. We know enough about quantum computers to be able to build some of them in limited ways which are commercially useful in very specific domains, so then companies can get investment to do that. But we still don't really understand all of the fundamentals, and it's always hard to raise investment for fundamental research. Suppose you could prove that building a quantum computer that can run Shor's Algorithm on interestingly large numbers is impossible. Knowing that would be of immense value. People could stop wasting time trying to create it or defend against it. But how would anybody commercialize that information? Who has the incentive to fund that research?
  - hannob 6y ago
    > We know enough about quantum computers to be able to build some of them in limited ways which are commercially useful in very specific domains In which way are quantum computers commercially useful?
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      > In which way are quantum computers commercially useful? VC Bait seems like a natural fit. Just say you are making a quantum computer that predicts global warming trends using blockchain. Might want to buy a wheel barrel for all your money you’ll be leaving that meeting with.
      - mr__y 6y ago
        You forgot about supporting 5G
kitteh 6y ago
Advisors make these recommendations. Say the right words about the US falling behind China or national security risk and no one wants to be the person on record who said no to this.
- krapp 6y ago
  >Say the right words about the US falling behind China or national security risk and no one wants to be the person on record who said no to this. Or just say Obama wouldn't have the guts to do it[0]. [0]https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-launched-yemen-raid-told-obama-wouldn-article-1.2966736 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-launched-yem...
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    Those only helps get one side on board.
trekrich 6y ago
so close to admitting trump has done something decent!
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  Is this coming from him directly? I would be really surprised, he has plenty of advisors for that. What comes out of him directly is more visible on ie twitter, different story
  - trekrich 6y ago
    You dont really know what directlys come from him though. His twitter account and all the stuff he says is just a smoke screen to keep everyone outraged. Who knows what he is really doing in the background.
    - whoiskevin 6y ago
      Oh please. As many have said stop pretending that he is playing chess when he is sitting there eating the pieces like a toddler.
    - dimillian 6y ago
      lol.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Better or worse, little of what the executive does is really because of the president directly. The president chooses the sort of people to put in positions of power then the whole ship largely sorts itself out. But the president gets to be responsible for everything because they are nominally in charge, and people keep pretending they are superheros with all sorts of ability to personally oversee how the US operates. We can certainly say that if Trump didn't want quantum computing research to happen his administration wouldn't be doing it. So if it does, he has de facto supported it. Even if by inaction.
  - inscionent 6y ago
    This is implementation of a law passed by congress in 2018.
loudtieblahblah 6y ago
>preceded by the words lack of or similar. Eh, bipartisan stuff still happens. Look at the military industrial complex. Expanding executive power, expanding the surveillance state. Pro wall street regulation repeal. Usually its to screw us
- hajile 6y ago
  While the media paints a different picture, bills sanctioning and restricting China have also been getting through which also means bi-partisan support despite the election rhetoric.
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  One does not simply get into $26T in debt without a whole lot of agreement from both sides of the aisle. To view any side as pure is to be a pawn in the overton window.
  - fearingreprisal 6y ago
    Why was this comment killed? It was just about the only sane comment in this thread.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      I'm not sure what the mechanism is (i.e. karma threshold or moderation) but it looks like all the account's comments are dead by default and have been for a very long time.
- rescripting 6y ago
  Viewed through that lens perhaps this initiative is to help push quantum computing to a place where it can break modern encryption.
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    Cynical me figured there wasn't much other purpose for those approving funding.
ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
Wonder if Peter Thiel had a hand in it.

SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago

Surely this amount pales in comparison to the likely level of investment in this field by the intelligence community, considering the implications for cryptography. This is like announcing $75m for nuclear technology research during the Manhattan Project.

dogma1138 6y ago
This is about setting curriculums at universities and student grants.
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
  Yes, and who do you think is most likely to hire those students after they’ve gained expertise in the field?
  - wadkar 6y ago
    Whoever is paying the most, probably?
ahelwer 6y ago
NIST is already well into a post-quantum crypto competition. Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA. Cloudflare has already prototyped protocols in TLS [0]. Scott Aaronson has gone on record saying he would be "astonished" if this happened within a decade. This isn't like the cold war days. The quantum computing research community is close-knit and people would notice researchers being hoovered up by the NSA; this hasn't happened. Shor's algorithm is undeniably a groundbreaking result but is not the killer app of quantum computers. It's more of an unfortunate side-effect. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/
- amelius 6y ago
  > Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA Yes, but the NSA could still decrypt messages from the past if they recorded and stored them.

mhxion 6y ago

This initiative is launched quicker than I expected, considering the pressure on federal budget due to the pandemic. It's part of National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December, 2018. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227

zenhack 6y ago
$75M is rounding error compared to anything being discussed in the vicinity of the pandemic; I wouldn't really expect it to enter into the conversation.
- throwaway72220 6y ago
  It is a start, right?
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Every line item in the budget is a rounding error until you add them all up.
  - zenhack 6y ago
    The package they passed in March was $2 trillion. That's _five orders of magnitude_ difference.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

I can build one for $20

trissylegs 6y ago

I think Australia has invested at least that over the past 12 years. Last year UNSW's Quantum Computer lab got a $25 million grant extension.

deleted 6y ago
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koheripbal 6y ago
This isn't the US's only quantum computing project or gov't funding.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fk6aaa545c 6y ago

"Defund the computing centers" when?

doersino 6y ago
The last time I checked, computing centers haven't been murdering people.
- fk6aaa545c 6y ago
  So check again. You can start by IBM back in the 40s ... and today have a look at NSA and CCP as well." Would be a nice "research" actaully.

biolurker1 6y ago

Why does the title have to be political ans not "The US gov..."? Sounds like there is an agenda

pbourke 6y ago
> "The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced Tuesday the establishment of three quantum computing centers across the nation, involving an investment of $75 million." It was a White House initiative, so the headline seems to be accurate.
jcfields 6y ago
If the administration deserves the blame when it does something bad, it deserves the credit when it does something good.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  "does" is doing a lot of work there.
anigbrowl 6y ago
The Hill is focused primarily on Washington politics so 75% of the stories are about the Administration/House/Senate/Supreme Court/Agency putting out a press release or taking some procedural step.
insensible 6y ago
Turn on any NPR News broadcast over at least the past two decades and the first story will invariably start "The ______ administration…", regardless of who's in office.
krapp 6y ago
It's common to refer to an administration by the name of the current President than "the US government," particularly within the US where the Hill is based. You can find numerous references for example to the "Obama Administration, Clinton Adminstration, Bush Administration, etc" in the media. There's no "agenda" at work here, you're just being needlessly paranoid.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

Someone needs to invest in developing improved mental models for quantum computers. Much of the development of classical computing (particular from a user perspective) was driven by metaphors: memory, stacks, pipes, files, folders, etc. What are useful metaphors in the application or use of quantum computers?

ahelwer 6y ago
Quantum computers are modeled with extremely basic linear algebra. Quantum states are vectors and gates are matrices which multiply those vectors to get new vectors. How much simpler do you want? You can explain most of it as rotations around the unit circle which we all learn in high school or earlier. The problem is pop science crap that tries to explain superposition and entanglement with complete word salad instead of "linear combination" and "product vector cannot be factored into tensor product of single-qbit states", respectively. Anyway it is extremely doubtful that more programmers will need to learn how to program a quantum computer than, say, will need to learn how to program a GPU. They're both useful co-processors for very specific workloads. Programming will remain a fundamentally classical endeavor.
- weakfish 6y ago
  Do you know how pretentious this sounds? Not everyone outside the HN tech bubble has any idea what those words mean.
  - derrick_jensen 6y ago
    Most advantages that quantum computing has aren't practical for most people outside "the HN tech bubble". It's meant for specialized types of high throughput computations.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    Popular science has been trying to explain quantum mechanics to people for well over half a century now, and it hasn't worked one time. All we got was a bunch of woo like What the Bleep do We Know?! You need math. There's no other way around it. Any understanding of quantum mechanics or computing that is not fundamentally rooted in mathematical reasoning is worse than mush.

russellbeattie 6y ago

This administration is anti-science in every way possible way - from the climate to covid to education and more. $75M is literally a rounding error when it comes to the federal budget. This is pure election year nonsense - basically it's a $75 million marketing ploy (using tax dollars) to beef up the administration's pitiful record on science. I am looking forward to the outrageous lies about this soon. Trump will have "saved the tech industry" or "invented quantum computing" and we'll hear stories about how amazed all the researchers are at how well he understands it since she's such a genius. I'll put money on it.

monoclechris 6y ago
Where?
sgt 6y ago
Well it sure fooled me. I was just about to vote for Trump based on this!
rvz 6y ago
Fantastic. We'll also be looking forward to hearing from you comparing him to fascist dictators and outright Nazis everywhere because orange man == bad. The situations you bring up is everyone's fault for not taking the pandemic seriously from the start. > This is pure election year nonsense Nonsense happens every election year. Just like the BLM chaos in 2016 and the Twitter archeologists finding dirt on everyone. History is repeating itself every election year.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  >The situations you bring up is everyone's fault for not taking the pandemic seriously from the start. // So Trump isn't a leader and should have been ignored from the get-go? Or, he is a leader and his actions are criminally incompetent? [or purposefully malicious??] Do you really believe it should be everyone for themselves rather than having a centrally funded means of establishing scientific consensus and propagating life-saving advice?
- akhilcacharya 6y ago

helsinki 6y ago

This is sublime. If you’re reading this, Trump, please do more of this.

bezmenov 6y ago

For those curious about Quantum computing, an excellent starting point: https://quantum.country/qcvc https://quantum.country/qcvc

JimRyan 6y ago

"We're making supercomputers, the best computers!" In all seriousness this is great news.

amINeolib 6y ago

Republicans And Democrats agree to spend more tax dollars. I'm shocked. What great initiative for our politicians to spend our money. /s Given we have private companies and universities working on this, seems like another way of growing government and giving money to politicians friends. Although since USD is a world currency, I suppose we can just print money and devalue which disproportionately affects foreigners.

snidane 6y ago

Hmm, I thought quantum computing is not happening. See https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-computing-as-a-field-is-obvious-bullshit/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-comput... Can somebody dispute this claim?

_8091149529 6y ago
It's tempting to dismiss that write-up due to its incendiary style, but I find that many of its "factory floor" level insights ring true to me. As an experimentalist, I would agree with the sentiment that the potential future applications of Quantum computing probably receive too much media attention, given the maturity level of existing technology. The technical arguments as to why building a useful QC will be impossible are a bit more shaky. First, the post seems to imply that the calibration effort scales with the number of gates in the algorithm. This is false. In reality, the number of interactions that need individual calibration is basically the number of qubit-qubit pairs exposed by the gate library. The most mainstream approach to error-corrected QC only uses nearest-neighbor interactions, and hence the scaling is linear. Second, it is not clear to me why the number of computational basis states (2^N) is relevant to the engineering at all. Following this line of thinking, the recent Quantum supremacy result by Google already amounted to a mastery of 2^53 ~ 10^16 degrees of freedom. Third, an argument is made that large-scale error correction will not work because of correlated errors, of unspecified nature. I think a claim like this should come with a mention of at least one concrete source of such errors, so that we could estimate its magnitude and potential severity. Note that such calculations are almost the essence of day-to-day work of a physicist. In the absence of more detail, I can make a generic counterargument: Any phenomenon causing such correlated errors by definition affects multiple physical qubits at once, and will tend to be more macroscopic in nature. This is in contrast with the processes that limit the fidelity of one- and two-qubit operations, which is what the error-correcting code will take care of. Macroscopic disturbances are exactly the ones that we can attempt to shield against with clever engineering.
- dandanua 6y ago
  John Martinis emphasized in his talks that they didn't observe any correlations between local errors in the Sycamore and the total error can be computed through the "high school probability theory" from the local errors. This pretty much silences deniers who used this totally made-up argument against quantum computing.

upofadown 6y ago

>...along with helping to develop curriculum for students in the quantum computing field to help expand the workforce in this area. How do you develop a curriculum for something that has not been invented yet and might not even be possible to expand to a useful level? How can you have a workforce? Sounds like someone was just cutting and pasting from a general policy...

non-entity 6y ago
Doesnt "the workforce" in quantum computing consist of physics PhDs anyways.

oldsklgdfth 6y ago

I can't tell if this number is large or small. However, all research institutions take a cut of grant money in what is usually called "Facilities and Administration" cost. My undergrad rate was 50% of the proposed sum. Obviously the exact rate varies, but the fee remains. Ex. If a professor is writes a proposal for 1M. When the funding agency awards it they tack on another 1M for the institution. This is why "expensive" research is favored in universities, over theoretical work. A big part of tenure review is how much money you have brought in in funding, because that's a direct measure of how much money you made the institution. So 75M is more like 30M-40M of directly funded research, with the rest going to the institutions. EDIT: Berkeley's F&A goes at high as 60%. https://spo.berkeley.edu/policy/fa.html#rates https://spo.berkeley.edu/policy/fa.html#rates

YinglingLight 6y ago
The professor's monthly stipend from the CCP surely eases the financial stress.
zucker42 6y ago
That seems like a perverse incentive.
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  Agreed. This is what you get when you measure performance in terms of profits. To quote Major General Smedley Butler: "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." Higher education is a rachet. Students pay ever-higher tuition, which at some level is backstopped by the government. If you don't go to college and pursue prestigious degrees the job market will be inaccessible, beyond basic skill entry level. Graduate students are exploited laborers for the promise of a PhD and a letter of recommendation for a postdoc. Drawing from a global pool of talent for cheap research labor. If you don't do everything your advisor says you will lose your visa, or not get a publication and your academic career is dead-on-arrival. Professors are in an environment that encourages pursuing expensive application-based research and high impact publications to pad their resumes for tenure. If you don't rake in the money and publish in "prestigious" journal (usually the walled off ones) you will not be considered for tenure, a raise, etc. Tax dollars fund research institutions that take their generous "administration" fees and then hand over findings to walled garden journals. If you don't fund research we will not make the breakthroughs that gave us out "comfortable" way of life. In the US, student athletes (until recently) could not profit off their likeness and all the money went to the school. At the end of the day, the team of MBAs and administrators make fat salaries. This wouldn't be so bad if institutions used the revenue to improve education and dissemination of knowledge. Instead, they build fancy stadiums and raise tuition.

nomad543 6y ago

Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin Dismisses Quantum Computing> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQSbV_BlI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQSbV_BlI8

dandanua 6y ago
Haters gonna hate. John Martinis at Google did a very good job for silencing those deniers.
- nomad543 6y ago
  So anyone who questions quantum computing is a hater? Your argument reminds me of one interview where Elizabeth Holmes said everyone was a hater for doubting her. John Martinis didn't silence anyone, after decades, still there's no verifiable proof of quantum computing.

IAmEveryone 6y ago

...and by not letting anyone not descending in a straight line from the Mayflower work at it, they make sure it's second-rate, at best. Of course if he also succeeds in abolishing universities' non-profit status as he's recently started adding to his culture war talking point reservoir, not even Americans will be there to run this thing.

biffstallion 6y ago

Came here looking for childish comments...leaving completely satisfied.

Apofis 6y ago

I'm really happy to hear this, but this problem is expensive and that better be a B next time.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

Since we're throwing trillions around these days (needed, absolutely,) I'd quietly sneak a few billion is vital things that are harder to fund in normal times. OK, here are $x Billion, make us #1 in this field.

_8091149529 6y ago

Title of the post is misleading: The newly-funded centers will address three different topics in the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS). Quantum computing (the integer-factoring kind) is the focus of only the UC Berkeley-led consortium. This effort accounts for 1/3 of the announced funding. The other two centers will work on Quantum networking (UIUC) and Quantum sensing (U Colorado). Original NSF announcement: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/072120.jsp https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/07212...

non-entity 6y ago
> Quantum networking Any recommended reading materials on this?

hello_1234 6y ago

Cue the closeted trump supporters finally coming out in hordes to pat themselves in the back. It's very likely the white house approved it not for science but more for "national security". Wouldn't it be great if someone can combine "climate science" together with "national security" to get some much needed funding for climate research.

Balgair 6y ago

The CU site is likely tied quantum gyros and axial sensors. Think super precise positional sensors. Quantum technology is more than just computers. Anyone know of any good quantum tech based companies in Boulder?

RocketSyntax 6y ago

Hmm. No MIT.